Musica Stampata – Issue 3 (June 2021)
Writing about imaginary music (is really like dancing about architecture) Autobiography, mini-theory, and mini-anthology of uphonic criticism by Gabriele Marino1
Abstract
Ever since its existence, music criticism has been cyclically accused of inadequacy (how can words capture the proverbial ineffability of sounds?), arbitrariness (what is the value of a judgment that seems so often indefensibly subjective?), uselessness (after all, what are the words of music critics if not false and parasitic?). If music criticism seems far-fetched and sterile, how should we judge the critical gesture exercised on music that does not even exist? It may seem strange, but in the course of music writing, some – critics, journalists, writers of “stuff about music” – have dedicated themselves to this paradoxical activity, with very different aims and styles. It is possible to write about records that do not exist, but about musicians that are quite real. Or to fantasise about music played and recorded by completely imaginary musicians. One may want to make fun of the music system (discography, stardom, fandom, the music press itself) or one may, instead, want to engage in a complicit game with whomever will read the – perhaps very plausible – review of that non- existent record. Writing about imaginary records is certainly a curious fact — Which allows us to illuminate, in a particularly effective way, the practice of writing about music in general.
“It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.” – Daniel Defoe in the exergue of Albert Camus’ The Plague
“Fake money is no more fake than real money.” – Dargen D’Amico
“It suffices that a record be possible for it to exist. Only the impossible is excluded.” – DJ Luis Borges, The Discoteque of Babel
1 Gabriele Marino is a semiotician who works at the University of Turin, Italy, within the FACETS research project. He has worked mainly on music, memes, martyrs, and masks. He single-authored two books in Italian, one on the reviews of records that do not exist (Britney canta Manson e altri capolavori, ‘Britney sings Manson and other masterpieces’, Falconara Marittima: Crac, 2011) and one on the semiotics of musical genres (Frammenti di un disco incantato, ‘A Broken Record’s Discourse: Fragments’, Torino: Aracne, 2020).
NOTE TO THE TEXT: This article represents a freeze-dried and, at the same time, expanded (in the sense of “updated”) version of the first of the two books mentioned above, the one on imaginary records. I have limited the bibliographical references to the bare minimum. Some URLs have been shortened via Bitly. I would like to thank Fiamma Mozzetta for her patience and for giving me the opportunity to finally return to this topic and present new archival material (for some of which I thank Gian Maria Rizzardi and Giulio Pasquali). 2
I fell for it. And I liked it
The December 2005 issue of Blow Up (a monthly Italian music magazine) featured on its cover the band Zu, a jazzcore trio from Ostia – “more famous abroad than in Italy” – which two years earlier had impressed me at the Ypsigrock festival in Castelbuono (Palermo, Sicily). A biblical downpour had postponed the live show for hours, and the concert had begun with a 180 bpm version of “Beat on the Brat” by the Ramones, during which Jacopo Battaglia, the drummer, had taken off one of his shoes and thrown it in the face of my neighbour in the audience. When the concert was over, I went to congratulate the band and try and chat with them: we started talking about Mundo Civilizado by Arto Lindsay. In those years I was compulsively – and one might add bulimically – approaching music criticism; something that, being a comicbook fan, I had discovered on Linus through Riccardo Bertoncelli’s music column. I used to buy Il Mucchio Selvaggio, a weekly Italian magazine at that time, regularly, and the other magazines (Rumore, Rockerilla, Buscadero, Blow Up) just occasionally (when there was something interesting on the cover; or when I had the money to buy them). I had certainly bought an issue of Blow Up back in 2003, the one that came with the book Rock e altre contaminazioni (‘Rock and other contaminations’): one of those guides that drove me crazy because the reviews were about strange artists and were well-written; for instance, the visionary article on the Stooges’ Fun House, written by a certain Christian Zingales. In addition to the article on Zu, written by Massimiliano Busti, that 2005 Blow Up issue contained the usual musical fruit salad (“Rock and other contaminations”, indeed): Kate Bush, Pharrell Williams, Darby Crash, Billie Holiday, Fausto Romitelli, Riccardo Cocciante. The very last page of the issue was dedicated to the new album by Vinicio Capossela, another musician who had struck me (with his epiphany at Daniele Luttazzi’s TV show “Satyricon”, where he presented Canzoni a manovella, ‘Hand-cranked Songs’, in 2001). The record had been recorded by Capossela with Elio Martusciello (who was known to me not only as a refined sound artist, but also as a refined essayist).2 The review of this record was written by someone with what I thought was a beautiful name: Dionisio Capuano. And it was beautiful to imagine: a Capossela album together with Martusciello. The review confirmed this hypothesis: it was a “sacred and desperate work. To the point that sounds were stripping bare”. It was a “concept-album with an expressionist-Kurtweillian structure, which mixes at least three stories. Peter and the Wolf [, ...] the Magic Flute [, and] the tale of a storyteller similar to a fusion between Mad Max and Zampanò.” In short: this strange, but not so strange, combination of Capossela and Martusciello does work.
“We figured that Elio Martusciello would get along well with ‘blood and sweat’ musicians. His collaboration with Mike Cooper (who comes from the blues and loves the ukulele) was just a hint. For his part, Capossela has his own oddities: improvisational upsurges, this idea of sinking into sonic mud, into the ‘waste disposal’ of genres, these emissions of folk-cabaret biogas whose stench may have attracted an anomalous electroacoustic type of guy like Elio. In Capossela’s pentagrams
2 Elio Martusciello, “Lumpy Gravy è un dispositivo di superficie,” in Frank Zappa domani: sussidiario per le scuole (meno) elementari, ed. Gianfranco Salvatore (Roma: Castelvecchi, 2000), 229–38. 3
mangling occurs, as the folk is tightened by itchy arrangements and the music cracks. This is well suited to the siliceous liquids of his ‘cousin’, to his high-low frequency sizzles, his sobbing drones, sinusoidal oscillations. They penetrate the lopsided bodies of the songs from behind and emerge from various orifices with the colour of fatuous fires”.
We are in the full pre-social media era, the apogee of websites, blogs, forums. Nobody, however, is talking about this record. How is that possible? Capossela is by now a big local star. So, when I pass in front of the only record store in my hometown, I go in and ask: is this Pierino l’eritematoso (‘Peter the erythematous’; this was the title) available, or can it be ordered? Does it exist? No, this beautiful record does not exist. It was a perfect object of desire. Not too different, in the end, from many of those other records I used to read about in music magazines which, if not imaginary, remained imagined only, for years; until I somehow managed to get them (by ordering very expensive import CDs or relying on friends who were early pioneers of eMule).
Imaginary records but real reviews
When someone writes about music writing there is this unwritten rule that says that either at the beginning or at the end (or somewhere in between, as in this case) the famous aphorism “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture” has to be evoked. The phrase is generally used to ridicule the pretensions of music criticism: its mission, translating music into words, is complex, paradoxical, basically meaningless.3 However, we know that a given cultural practice does not exist without the discoursive practice that enhances and actually constructs it as such in the first place: with the aesthetologist Dino Formaggio we can say not only that in the 20th century “art is everything that Mankind calls art” (let us think of Duchamp), but that, basically, it has always been so, only in a more disguised, negotiated way. Criticism is not an accessory to music, but rather what makes music music. Since the end of the Baroque period, music has gradually freed itself from the social role to which it could be reduced (liturgical music, court music, theatre music, dance music), giving room to a defunctionalised music, whose purpose was simply to be listened to, and which needed specific discourses that would explain its meaning and purpose. This new way of experiencing music was born at about the same time that both the aesthetics of music and bourgeois newspapers were born: thus, music criticism was born. The more its task seems difficult, the more crucial it is: the more music seems to be abstract and ineffable – the more it seems to have no sense – the more it is necessary to interpret it, in order to understand it. Music criticism, in short, is not necessarily a lesser evil, but certainly a necessary one. In his Sociology of Music, Theodor Adorno argued that
3 The phrase has been attributed to anyone who has ever walked the stage; it was written down for the first time in an interview with Elvis Costello (Musician 60, Oct. 1983), but was probably coined by fantasist Martin Mull, who had already come out with a “Writing about painting is like dancing about architecture”. Before Wikipedia, the most comprehensive reference to the aphorism was the TAMILDAA page edited by Alan P. Scott (http://www.paclink.com/~ascott/they/tamildaa.htm). 4 criticism relies on two pillars: History and Technique.4 Bernard Shaw argued that the best music critic is not the most brilliant musicologist or the most sensitive soul, but rather the best writer. It is certain that criticism means conciliating these different aspects, oscillating between opposite poles, balancing these elements that are not always easy to reconcile: music (the object and end of criticism) and writing (the medium used by it); subjectivity (at times concealed, and at times highlighted) and objectivity (declared or only suggested); information, description, judgment and transfiguration (where does one begin and end?); journalism, aesthetics, analysis and narrative (every critical gesture, of any kind, contemplates at least a certain percentage of these elements). In order to better understand this system, this particular semiosphere, as Russian semiotician Jurij Lotman would say, we can observe the dynamics that activate it in the first place, the tensions that go across it from its centre to its boundaries. The most interesting things happen here, at the boundaries, as we find inchoative, terminative and contaminated tokens, allowing us to shed light in an oblique way on the whole phenomenon we are investigating. Things at the limits may provide us with a heuristic: if a review deals with a record that does not exist, it will have to magnify its structural characteristics, placing in the foreground what makes it a review in order to justify its own existence — Given the fact that its object (the music) has disappeared. There are reviews of records that do not exist and because of this paradoxical condition (which makes them a (sub)genre in their own right) they must somehow be even more reviews than the others (more reviews than those that talk about records that do exist). They let the writing expand, as they are essentially writing. The what, the music, becomes transparent and, eventually, what emerges is how words construct this supposed music. Reviews of fake records (fake because they are only written) play at the border between possible, plausible, and impossible, between phantasmagoria and rigour, history and imagination, and between those who write them and the expectations of those who find themselves reading them. Fiction tells us about worlds that do not exist (worlds which, following Eco, must be well “furnished” in order to be credible).5 Yet, in doing so, it tells us about ourselves and our reality: which is only one of many possibilities, as the writer Augusto Frassineti would say.6 Literature, after all, is not only made up of stories that have never happened, but also of books and writers that have never existed, except in the virtuality of being evoked in other books, written by other writers in turn: think of Marcel Schwob, Jorge Luis Borges, Flann O’Brien, Roberto Bolaño. We can perfectly understand The Little Dog Laughed, the story written by John Fante’s alter ego Arturo Bandini (in Ask the Dust, 1939), albeit we will never read it. Paolo Albani has made a census of the imaginary books scattered throughout the history of literature7 and he himself has written an entire book of reviews of books that do not exist (Il sosia laterale, ‘The lateral double’, 2003), in
4 Theodor W. Adorno, “Public Opinions and Critics,” in Introduction to the Sociology of Music, by Theodor W. Adorno (New York, NY: Continuum/Seabury Press, 1976), 138–53. 5 Umberto Eco, “Lector in Fabula: Pragmatic Strategy in a Metanarrative Text,” in The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1979), 200–261. 6 In Misteri dei ministeri (1952-1973) (‘Misteries of the Ministries’). 7 Paolo Albani and Paolo Della Bella, Mirabiblia: catalogo ragionato di libri introvabili (Milano: Zanichelli, 2003). Literature does not deal only? with books but also with films that do not exist: Stefano Ercolino et al., eds., Imaginary Films in Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2015). 5 which he tells us, for example, about this strange phenomenon of “doppelgängers in profile”, or that there is a mathematical law that states that the length of the author’s biography on the back cover of their books must be inversely proportional to their fame.8 If we immerse ourselves in this fake yet real scenario – as shown in an extraordinary way by Orson Welles (F for Fake, 1973) – we are able to enjoy films that do not exist and yet do exist as mockumentaries. From Jim McBride (David Holzman’s Diary, 1967) onwards, they are a perfect vehicle not only for imagining something by playing with the medium and its language, but also for rewriting the very history of the medium.9 We can enjoy John Cage’s pieces of music even before we hear them, or without hearing them at all; thanks to their utopian ability to remain themselves while passing through their always different contingent incarnations. Extreme examples, such as the Theatre of Musical Optics officiated by John Zorn in the mid-70s, suggest that it is possible to think of music beyond sound: in silence.10 In other cases, however, the spotlight of sense-making is all about the intersemiotic capacities of words, understood as the ultimate metalanguage. In 2018, the new album by Matthew Herbert, always prone to radicalism, simply titled The Music, is not a record, but a book:
I will write a description of the record rather than make the music itself. It will be divided into chapters in the same way that an album is separated into? tracks. […] Each chapter will describe in precise detail what sounds to use, how they should be organised and occasionally an approximation of what the net result should sound like.11
Conceptual artist Gian Paolo Guerini has composed music designed to remain unplayed;12 this is a bit like the destiny of Adrian Leverkühn, a sort of doppelgänger of Arnold Schönberg imagined by Thomas Mann (with Adorno’s special consultation) in his Doktor Faustus (1947). The reviews of non-existing records – such as that of Capossela, Martusciello, Peter and the wolf – which I present here all derive in some way from this musical Faust: we are not satisfied with the music we already have, we want more even if we will never be able to listen to it; if not through this strange form of discography that, mindful of Queneau and the OuLiPo, I would call “potential”. This music criticism that talks about sounds that were never played seems to me suitably uphonic.
The Graal of bootlegs
Greil Marcus (b. 1945) was one of the first professional rock journalists and, from the beginning, one of the most accredited. He is the author of classic books such as Mystery Train (1975), in
8 See also the less refined case of https://almanaccum.blogspot.com/ (2013-2014). 9 I am thinking of Peter Jackson’s Forgotten Silver (1995) which gave birth to cinema in New Zealand and not in the hands of the Lumière brothers. 10 Ela Troyano, “John Zorn’s Theatre of Musical Optics,” in John Zorn, ed. Walter Rovere and Carla Chiti, Sonora: Itinerari Oltre Il Suono (Milano: Auditorium/Materiali Sonori, 1998), 90–99. 11 https://unbound.com/books/matthewherbert/#synopsis. 12 http://www.gianpaologuerini.it/08_entire/the_entire_cdrom/. 6 which he discusses rock as a cultural form, by focussing on some key icons (Harmonica Frank, Robert Johnson, The Band, Sly Stone, Randy Newman, Elvis Presley). Or Lipstick Traces (1985), in which he reconstructs the dangerous relationships that bind punk and avant-garde. The opening to his review of Bob Dylan’s “Christian album”, Self Portrait (1970), is memorable: “What is this shit?”. The second half of the Sixties marks the apogee of stardom in rock music. 1967 is the annus mirabilis when so many important, beautiful, and famous records were published, at the intertwining of rock, psychedelia, and hippie (counter)culture; the following year the signs of hypertrophy and solipsistic retreat in this flourishing and contradictory world already appear evident: 1968 was the year of Super Sessions by Bloomfield, Kooper & Stills, the record that codified superjams and superbands (a promising trend in the beginning, an obnoxious one in fact), and in 1969 the first real bootleg, Great White Wonder, came to light, including pirate recordings of Bob Dylan with The Band. At the time, Marcus wanted to deal a blow to this rock and roll mythology: the uncritical acceptance of fans, the idea of an untouchable Olympus of rockstars, and the transformation of all this into a commodity. Rolling Stone #44 (Oct. 1969) featured the review of the first homonymous pirate record by the mysterious Masked Marauders: Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison of the Beatles, produced by Al Kooper, captured while they play together in a cabin in the woods, jamming on old and new classics. The review is written by a certain T. M. Christian, aka Marcus: a wink at the satirical novel by Terry Southern – screenwriter of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove – The Magic Christian, published in 1959 (and which, in Dec. 1969, would be made into a movie starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr). But the review also winks at the reader in another way. All records have a cover: even those that do not exist. The Masked Marauders’ album has as its cover image (in that Rolling Stone issue) a promotional photo of actress Sharon Tate, taken by the man who was to become her husband, director Roman Polanski, for his film The Fearless Vampire Killers (Fig. 1). The photo had appeared in the March 1967 issue of Playboy. It is likely that Marcus had chosen this image to reinforce the humorous, surreal and even grotesque element of the review: Polanski’s film was a comedy horror and soon became a cult hit in “midnight cinemas”. We are not able today to reconstruct exactly when Marcus closed the drafts of the newspaper (and are therefore unable to establish whether it was a completely random, sinister synchronicity, or an intentional act prompted by an excess of bad taste), but at the time of publication of the review Sharon Tate and the baby she was carrying had already been killed by the frenzied members of Charles Manson’s Family (Aug. 9, 1969). Even though the tone of the Christian/Marcus article was clearly exaggerated and parodic (the disengaged strumming of these bored rock stars is spoken of as divine gestures that illuminate the very meaning of life), and despite the stunned denial published in the San Francisco Chronicle by Rolling Stone co-founder Ralph J. Gleason, fans of supersessions, supergroups and superbootlegs began a veritable treasure hunt in record stores. Dumbfounded and embittered by the absurd misunderstanding (his jab at the follies of the rock world ended up fuelling them; what was meant to be a satire turned into a hoax), Marcus convinced Warner Bros. to really produce the 7
Masked Marauders’ record for $15,000 dollars. An LP was rapidly recorded and released, played by simple studio session men (the Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band), with the same title, an almost identical cover (no longer a photo of Sharon Tate, but a different model in the same pose; Fig. 2) and a tracklist with some of the same songs (like the “hit” I Can’t Get No Nookie, written by Marcus himself as a perfect pastiche of the style of the Rolling Stones) used in the review. This record, a real fake, remained in the Billboard charts for about 12 weeks, reaching 114th position and ending up selling more than 100,000 copies in the United States. Once the hoax was revealed, Robert Christgau, the self-declared “dean of American rock critics”, sarcastically named the Masked Marauders’ album “record of the year 1969” (Village Voice, Jan. 8, 1970). The rock fashion of supersessions and supergroups certainly did not end with the unintentional situationism of the Masked Marauders. In 1978 the Band’s The Last Waltz was released, a concert film overseen by the watchful eye of Martin Scorsese, together with its soundtrack on three LPs, recorded in 1976 at the Winterland Arena in San Francisco, with guest stars such as Eric Clapton, Dr. John, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Muddy Waters, Neil Young, Ronnie Wood, Ringo Starr and, of course, Bob Dylan. In 1988, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne (of the Electric Light Orchestra), Roy Orbison and Tom Petty were to get together under the name Traveling Wilburys, releasing their first self-titled Vol. 1 in October.
From garage-rock to superfusion
Lester Bangs (1948-1982) is the most celebrated rock critic of all time: probably the only one to truly embody the motto of Paul Williams, founder of the first ever rock fanzine, Crawdaddy!, according to which “you don’t need a guitar to be a rock and roll hero”. In Creem vol. 3, no. 3, June 1971, Bangs published an article set in an unspecified, but unrealistic, near future and written in the form of a dialogue between a wise old black man and the group of brats who gather around him to listen to his stories. The old man recounts the epic of Count Five, actually an absolutely minor band from the garage rock era, but responsible for a cult song, however derivative, such as Psychotic Reaction, from 1966. Bangs envisions a super-experimental development of this band’s career, with four albums that are overflowing and baroque, psychedelic, prog and orchestral, just like their titles: Carburetor Dung, Cartesian Jetstream, Ancient Lace and Wrought-Iron Railings, Snowflakes Falling on the International Dateline. The article is a declared divertissement, full of other improbable and fictional details, but also a real manifesto: Bangs does not miss the opportunity to promote, once again, his aesthetic of noise and excess, in opposition to the standard of soft rock radio that was emerging in the early seventies, epitomized by musicians such as James Taylor, the journalist’s recurring polemic totem . The Count Five never took off in the way Bangs had fantasised (they disbanded in 1969, after only one album and a handful of singles) but, perhaps thanks to his affectionate, antagonist mythologizing, their Psychotic Reaction was included in the anthology Nuggets, an early testimony of retromaniac temperament edited by guitarist Lenny Kaye in 1972.
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The tombstone of West Coast sound
Riccardo Bertoncelli (b. 1952) is the enfant prodige as well as the writer par excellence of Italian rock journalism. In the summer of 1972, inspired by the Marcus/Marauders case, Bertoncelli published in his fanzine Freak a review of the fictitious Smiles of Heaven, a record that was supposed to contain the jams of Jimi Hendrix along with other stars of the psychedelic season, such as Jerry Garcia, guitarist of the Grateful Dead. This review was a prank at the expense of one of the main record importers of the time, Paolo Carù who, however, was shrewd enough to see through it, unlike many readers who, fascinated by the idea of finally being able to hear some of the fabled unreleased sessions of the great guitarist, tried to order the disc at Carù’s record shop in Gallarate (Varese, Lombardy). Bertoncelli further perfected the joke in number 11 (Nov. 1975) of Gong, one of the most influential magazines in the Italian advertising scene. Today it is difficult to imagine, but this was an era in which a criticism (of Guccini’s Stanze di vita quotidiana, ‘Rooms of everyday life’, 1974) could project Bertoncelli as the polemical totem par excellence in Guccini’s L’avvelenata (‘The Poisoned One’; in Via Paolo Fabbri 43, 1976), or force (this time the record is Crac! by Area, 1975) Demetrio Stratos to take the floor and respond in kind in the newspaper’s column. In Gong Bertoncelli imagines the sequel of the extraordinary Dèjà Vu by Crosby Stills Nash & Young, published in 1970: the most perfect manifesto of West Coast sound. He describes with transport the atmospheres and sounds of this fantadisc, titled Red Woods, relying also on the power of an exceptional aid: the cover, simply perfect in its (stereo)typicality, designed by Mario Convertino, one of the most talented graphic designers of the period (Fig. 3). This time, Bertoncelli’s hoax succeeds so well and enjoys such far-reaching, nationwide reverberations, that it necessitates the intervention of the Italian detachment of the record company WEA, which publishes an official statement clarifying that “this record does NOT exist”. From then on, Bertoncelli will prove unable to stop himself, continuing to write, from time to time, (mini)reviews of non-existent records, often in cahoots with his colleague Franco Bolelli, in the column “Musica da non consumare” (‘Music not to be consumed’) hosted by the magazine Linus. And he will subsequently entitle, with a thought to John Cage, his most beautiful collection of musical writings Paesaggi immaginari (‘Imaginary landscapes’, 1998).
A Wild Bunch of reviews
Maurizio Bianchini (b. 1948), with the collaboration of two other historical names of Italian rock criticism, Eddy Cilìa and Federico Guglielmi, publishes inside the column “Platea” in the monthly magazine Il Mucchio Selvaggio (‘The Wild Bunch’, March and April 1985, n. 86 and 87) eight reviews, each of which is quite transparently a parody of the linguistic tics and musical quirks of the following journalists: Paolo Carù, Peppe Riva, Claudio Sorge, Massimo Bassoli, Sergio D’Alesio, Pierluigi Caporale, Roberto D’Agostino, and Giampiero Vigorito (their names are 9 mangled and distorted; for example, Carù becomes Ragù).13 The reviews focus as much on real artists, always onomastically mispronounced and disguised (Byrds, Edoardo Bennato, Wham!, Roberto D’Agostino himself, Frank Zappa, who becomes Frank Mazza),14 as on stereotypically imaginary artists: the Roaring Hellbellies for the garage rock much loved by Carù, the Devilish Teachers for Riva’s heavy metal, the 8.000 Miles High for the neo-psychedelia of Sorge.
Finally, the Boss’ live record
Massimo Cotto (b. 1962), in cahoots with the magazine’s editor Max Stèfani, and in turn inspired by the Bertoncelli/Red Woods case, published in issue 100 of Il Mucchio Selvaggio (May 1986) the review of Songs to Orphans, the long-awaited first live album by the king of blue collar rock, Bruce Springsteen. Cotto imagines the triple vinyl, which the editorial staff would receive as an advance from none other than Clarence Clemons – the saxophonist of the E-Street Band – in person, with a mixture of philological rigour and tongue-in-cheek taunting aimed at the rocker’s followers. This time, too, the game succeeded, unleashing fans in record stores in vain. But, above all, just a few months later, in November 1986, Springsteen’s first live record was released for real: Live:1975-85, not a triple, but a five-vinyl box set. Dangerously similar to the one imagined by Cotto.
Small Situationist Experiments
Vittore Baroni (b. 1956), rock critic, standard bearer of the less compromising industrial and new wave music, collector, curator and mail artist of international importance, has scattered throughout his journalistic career small experiments in potential discography. One of the many possible examples: in 2005 he invented the album, Riserva di caccia (‘Hunting Reserve’), by a fictitious animalist punk band, Polpetta e i cani avvelenati (‘Meatball and the Poisoned Dogs’). For years he has kept the “Outsider” column in the magazine Rumore (‘Noise’), often enriching his articles on real artists (for example, the Dutch noise band Masonic Youth, in issue 174-175 of the monthly magazine, summer 2006) with events or details that have been cleverly imagined. Baroni goes back to a noble Situationist tradition which has been perfectly metabolised within Italian rock journalism since its origins; the most remarkable case, in this sense, is certainly that of Re Nudo (‘Naked King’), the magazine of the Counterculture, in whose columns reviews of imaginary records were regularly published, accompanied by the explicit declaration that: “Among these reviews there is one of a record that does not exist. Whoever guesses the imaginary review will receive the record as a gift”. This tendency, whereby the spirit of the prankster and the ante litteram troll always wins over a potential hoax component, would continue to inhabit the columns of Italian music criticism.
13 Ragù is the most traditional Italian meat sauce. 14 In Italian zappa means ‘hoe’ and mazza means ‘stick’ (with noted sexual allusion). 10
The first words of John Zorn
On Apr. 1, 2005 on the website of the historic record store Aquarius Records (which opened in San Francisco in 1970 and closed down in 2016), the news appears of the imminent arrival of an album that, from its description, immediately seems mythological: an album containing nothing less than the recording of the first wails uttered by the icon of New York radicalism, saxophonist and composer John Zorn. Two syllables, “Goo” and “Gah”, of which the site also furnishes the relevant audio clips. The disc is said to further contain some compositions commissioned by Zorn, as usual, to some of his trusted collaborators. And the booklet supposedly reports the full text of the musician’s doctoral thesis entitled: The Ontological Implications Of My First Utterance. OK, maybe all of this – maybe – is really too much even for someone like Zorn. The record is, of course, an April Fool’s joke. Yet someone actually bought it: for years First Words (Tzadik, 2005) appeared, even briefly commented, on Piero Scaruffi’s website.15 It is worth quoting the text of this review (actually: press kit) which is nowadays accessible only from the archived version of the Aquarius website (on the page there is also a tiny thumbnail that claims to represents the album cover: a grotesquely infantilized Zorn, caught while “pronouncing” with swollen cheeks, like when playing a wind instrument).16
ZORN, JOHN First Words (Tzadik) CD + Book 45.00 THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, MAINLY BECAUSE IT WAS AN APRIL FOOLS JOKE! HEE HEE! SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY. It’s hard to believe it’s already been half a year since John Zorn’s 50th birthday party. People are STILL talking about what a great party it was and what an excellent batch of new Tzadik releases related to his septuagenarian anniversary we’ve been blessed with. Wow. Wow! I mean WOW! And what more of a suitable way of kicking off the second half of this year’s batch than with First Words. Recorded in the early months of 1955 by his doting mother (using a portable Wollensack recorder purchased at Sears) as he lay in his crib in his yellow and gray camouflage pajamas, the first track of First Words is exactly as one would expect: The very first words uttered by John Zorn! These two syllables, spoken in the interval of a major second, have mystified Zorn for most of his life. This kernel of music, this germinal source of inspiration, was it meant to lead into something, or was it a cadence? Frustrated in his attempts to understand the genius of his earlier self, Zorn went so far as to enroll in Columbia University’s Ph.D. program in musicology in an attempt to analyze and break the code on the brief musical passage. The fruits of his labors resulted in the completion of his thesis: The Ontological Implications Of My First Utterance, which is included in hardback form in this limited edition first pressing. The remaining 11 tracks on the album are all compositions commissioned by Zorn and performed by the Downtown scene’s greatest: Steve Lacy, Wayne Horvitz, Ikue Mori, Fred Frith, Marc Ribot, Elliott Sharp, Dave Douglas, Otomo Yoshihide and more!
The Wunderkammer of (im)possible records
15 I reported the spoof record myself to Scaruffi, who then deleted it from his website: http://bit.ly/scaruffi-zorn-words. 16 https://web.archive.org/web/20130426113053/http://aquariusrecords.org/cat/jazz29.html. Unfortunately, the two audio clips are now unobtainable. 11
Dionisio Capuano (b. 1963) has been writing for years about imaginary records, an object to which he dedicated the column “Mission: It’s Possible”, hosted in issues 81 (Feb. 2005) to 163 (Dec. 2011) of the monthly magazine Blow Up. His is a unique case: a diachronic potential discography and uphonic criticism, continued over time. Interviewed in 2008, Capuano himself identified three particularly representative reviews within this vast corpus. Remained Lights, from Blow Up 92 (January 2006), is supposed to be Bob Dylan’s third renaissance propitiated by the holy hand of producer Daniel Lanois (after the masterpieces Oh Mercy, 1989, and Time Out of Mind, 1997), this time – and finally – in a new wave key; the title and cover of the album are, in fact, quite obviously a wink at Talking Heads’ Remain in Light (1980) (Fig. 4). Hypothetical Spiral Jazz Club: Reconstructing Buddy, from Blow Up 97 (June 2006), is a tribute to the mysterious Buddy Bolden, the New Orleans cornetist and “inventor of improvisation” whose music was never recorded, by a group of heterogenous sound artists (among whom Mark Wastell, Brian Morley and John Duncan; the latter being one of Capuano’s recurring obsessions). The Body EP: Spears Sings Manson, from Blow Up 101 (Oct. 2006), is the record with which the “Lolita” pop star Britney, produced by Trent Reznor, the deus ex machina of Nine Inch Nails, supposedly performed what would have been, for her, a decidedly unorthodox repertoire: four songs written by Charles Manson – the guru of the dark side of flower power, instigator of the assassination of that Sharon Tate who featured on the cover of Masked Marauders – remade in a “dance-kitsch-techno” key. The only other case approaching that of “Mission: It’s Possible” is the volume by Reg Mastice, aka Marco Reggiani, which, as per its title, collects the reviews of I 150 migliori dischi inesistenti della storia del rock (2020) (‘The 150 best non-existent records in the history of rock’), written since 2008 as a sort of chain letter, bearing well in mind the Bangsian model but, more generally, the entire history of imaginary record writing.17
God save the metamusical
Also thanks to the testimonies of two of the most decisive British music critics of all time, Simon Reynolds (b. 1963) and Paul Morley (b. 1953), it is easy to understand how writing about music is a practice with strong, innate “meta-” tendencies. And that the nerds who talk and write about music share, at least in part, the same basic imagery. Reynolds tells18 of how in 1986, in the fanzine Monitor (whose columns would later nurture those of the much more famous Melody Maker), he had invented the electro/glam band William Wilson/Wilson Sisters (phantasmagorical from the name of Edgarallanpoeian memory). Morley bears de facto witness to this tendency, and does so in a paroxysmal way in his self-fictional pastiche Words and Music (2003), a splendidly onanistic sequence of exploded and annotated lists, in which the philosopher of the language game and life- form Ludwig Wittgenstein literally sings and plays along with the glittering pop star Kylie Minogue. The animators of the old forum of Il Mucchio Selvaggio used to fantasise and nerd out
17 Reg Mastice, I 150 migliori dischi inesistenti della storia del rock (Roma: Arcana, 2020). 18 Personal communication via email, 2008. 12 in a not too different way, courting with their imagination some of the artists that also recur in the case study reviews that we have briefly mentioned here.19 Just one example among many: post- Bonzo Led Zeppelin recurs both in the columns of “Mission: It’s Possible” (Blow Up 117, Feb. 2008) and in those of the Mucchio forum. The same obsession is found in the extraordinary audio montages proposed by the blog Albums that never were (2012-still active; see also Rock reimagined, 2015),20 which vivisects existing music to try to make us hear what could have been (the first example of these real Klangexperiments is, not surprisingly, the lost Beach Boys masterpiece, Smile). This is a poetics that transforms bastard pop and the mashup of John Oswald’s Plunderphonics or Negativland’s noise cut-ups into a system. After all, if one thing emerges strongly from all these fantasised sounds it is that they are, in fact, nothing more than a circumvention, a turning around; we rush towards the unprecedented, the unheard of, we strive to create the ekphrasis of a radically new music, but in fact all we do is work with combinations,21 more or less refined, building Frankensteins, musical chimeras:22 Capuano says it clearly, what he does is a “rummage through garbage”. At this point, Adam Harper would ask himself: but then, can we really not imagine alien styles and musical genres, new types of music, new ways of making music?23 It seems impossible to get out of the cultural categories we have built over the centuries, let alone turn to perceptual ones; we may have to wait for the arrival of a genuinely transhumanist music to achieve something similar and be able to hear the unheard24. We have seen it: we often just imagine not music that is new, but new music; a new record, a new track, with its beautiful – fundamental – artwork25.
19 Page created Nov. 3, 2006, now unreachable (at URL http://forum.ilmucchio.it/showthread.php?t=29717). 20 http://albumsthatneverwere.blogspot.com/ and http://rockreimagined.blogspot.com/. 21 Umberto Eco, “Combinatoria della creatività” (lecture for the Nobel Foundation held in Florence, Italy, November 15, 2004), http://bit.ly/eco-combinatoria. 22 Roberto Agostini, “Chimere. Note su alcune musiche (im)popolari contemporanee,” in Sound tracks: tracce, convergenze e scenari negli studi musicali, by Francesco D’Amato (Roma: Meltemi, 2002), 97–125. 23 Adam Harper, Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-Making (London: Zero Books, 2011). 24 David Trippett, “Music and the Transhuman Ear: Ultrasonics, Material Bodies, and the Limits of Sensation,” The Musical Quarterly 100, no. 2 (2018): 199–261, https://doi.org/10.1093/musqtl/gdy001. 25 It is no exaggeration to say that, just as a musical genre can be cruelly reduced to its very name, a record can be reduced to its cover. In 2018, Sergio Messina, musician (“the author of the cult RadioGladio”) and lecturer, imagined a series of paradoxical covers (http://bit.ly/sergio-messina-covers) for as many paradoxical record projects (example: Battiato and Pippo Franco covering each other, Stravinsky playing Frank Zappa); two of them, not particularly paradoxical – plausible, indeed – but equally perturbing (Fela Kuti and Steve Reich, Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis) were published within the volume Noch mehr Lärm! Ein Pop-Lesebuch, edited by Wolfgang Pollanz for kürbis editions (2019). In 2012, electro-pop duo Prince Rama released the album Top Ten Hits Of The End Of The World, a compilation that supposedly photographed the state of the record charts at the stroke of the apocalypse, complete with press releases and promotional photos of all the fictitious artists and bands (http://bit.ly/prince-rama-end-press). Clothes may not make the man, but the product of the culture industry probably does: the pseudo-Berlinguer of Lettere agli eretici (‘Letters to the Heretics’, 1977) hit the mark and imposed himself on the imagination of the Movement also thanks to the accurate mimesis of the graphic design of the Einaudi series “Il Politecnico” (http://archiviomaclen.blogspot.com/2012/06/lettere-agli-eretici.html). The importance of the cover, in general, and not only with reference to imaginary records, surely deserves more in-depth study (iconographic studies in this specific field are, until now, rather limited and rhapsodic), overriding the idea that it represents a mere paratext. 13
We want it all and we want it now. So much so that we do not pay attention to the self- deprecating sirens scattered through the pages of imaginary record reviews. And we still run to the nearest record store to ask for our new to-be fetish, by our all-time favourite artist/s (it does not seem accidental that, in the face of the infinite possibilities offered by the web, with the digitisation and dematerialisation of music there has been an atrophy of the potential discography). Few, in fact, are the imaginary records designed for imaginary artists. The game, in short, seems much more fun when the gap between reality and fantasy thins out indefinitely. Perhaps because, on closer inspection, the world of music – mostly, it must be said, from the non-Art music area: popular, folk, jazz – is already populated by strange characters, pseudonyms, heteronyms, disguises, masks, which keep a foot in each dimension, halfway between autobiography and third person narrative: Blind Joe Death (John Fahey), Blind Boy Grunt (Bob Dylan), Penguin Cafe Orchestra (Simon Jeffes), Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (David Bowie), The Dukes of Stratosphear (XTC), Marvin Pontiac (John Lurie), The Passengers (U2 with Brian Eno), Porcupine Tree (Steven Wilson), Psychedelic Cornflakes (Edgar Neubauer), and so on. But let’s also just think of the likes of Buckethead, Jandek, the Residents, Sun Ra, Robert Johnson, or the aforementioned Buddy Bolden. And spoof bands – fake, but real – like The Rutles or Spın̈ al Tap. It is in this wake that in 2002 the Barlumen Institute of Marco Drago and Gaetano Cappa narrated in the radio drama of the same name the secret story of Leon Country, a character who was behind the scenes at the origins of blues, jazz and rock and roll.26
Mission?: Possible!
We will conclude by going back, after a nice panoramic tour, to where we started. The non-existent – but plausible – Capossela who puts Pierino e il lupo back into sound and into play. Here, the case of “Mission: It’s Possible” is certainly the most complex and semiotically interesting; not only on account of its quantitative scope, but also due to its ability to be, at the same time, the most genuinely critical, meta-critical and narrative. Capuano, in fact, has not only managed to construct a rigorous – and cerebrally playful – discourse on possible musics, in a sort of indefatigable but exhausting “what if?” (providing, moreover, a clear interpretative perspective on dozens and dozens of careers, both major and minor; for example: what would happen if Dylan finally decided to make his electronic/experimental record?), but he has also built a real narrative, crossed by mystical and eschatological accents, on the sense of the music of research intended as the practice of research of music. Capuano seems to tell us that, after the existence of something extreme like John Duncan’s performance Blind Date (1980), a staging that was not recited but experienced on the flesh of the apparently unfeasible and impossible, every further prospect of artistic creation can only take place on the horizon of conceptual escapism, of – albeit plausible – fantasising, of the game played out on the very fine border between the impossible and the possible.
26 It is precisely on the overflowing fictional imagery typical of rock and roll that satirical operations are grafted, such as the one hatched in 2013 by Jimmy Kimmel, the crew of whose show went to ask the unsuspecting – and arrogant, one might add – audience of the Coachella festival (https://youtu.be/W_IzYUJANfk) for their account and opinion of completely invented bands. 14
It is known that Richard Meltzer (b.1945), another mythological rock critic (part of the “Noise Boys” trio that in addition to Bangs also included Nick Tosches, who was born in 1949 and died in 2019), used to review records without ever having heard them (he had done the same with the novel Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973, by Thomas Pynchon, without being detected; concluding, perhaps not wrongly, that no one had really read that unreadable novel), so that the record – more than imaginary – ends up becoming imagined; if we rotate the vertices of the semiotic square again, we can observe that the review of the record that does not exist passed off as existing is opposed to that of the existing record passed off as non-existent. In “Mission: It’s Possible”, as a rule, everything is true – names of musicians, titles of other records and songs cited, references to novels, films and works of art, footnotes included (as is customary in scientific papers) – except the record being reviewed. In a couple of cases, however, Capuano has done the opposite, telling the truth while passing it off as false. He reviewed I Have a Big Bird Now by Anthony and the Zatanos, a record that really existed, even if only in mp3 bootleg form, on the SoulSeek sharing platform (Blow Up 108, May 2007). And he talked about a record that did not actually exist, but simply because it had not yet been recorded: writing about the fictitious The Ecstacy of Saint Therese (Blow Up 100, Sep. 2006), Capuano rather accurately described what Portishead’s third expected album (Third), which was to see the light only two years later, would sound like. Confirming, in a way that is certainly a bit twisted, Jacques Attali’s intuition that music – or, in this case, its narration – has genuinely prophetic capacities.27 After all, Capuano’s “Mission” had opened – it was the second instalment of the series – with a record by Zorn inspired by Saint John of the Cross (John Zorn’s Cost of Discipleship: Ascent to Mount Carmel, in Blow Up 82, March 2005): in 2013 the New York saxophonist would actually release a record dedicated to the “torments of the saints” (On The Torment Of Saints, The Casting Of Spells And The Evocation Of Spirits), in 2019 one dedicated to St. Francis (Nove Cantici Per Francesco D’Assisi) and, as I am terminating these lines (Easter 2021), an album of his dedicated to St. Teresa D’Avila (Teresa De Avila) has just been released.
27 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
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